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Public posts on Facebook become results for Russian search engine

A page of Yandex search results, soon to be augmented on the front and from the back with Facebook’s data.

Facebook entered a partnership Tuesday with the Russian search engine Yandex that will allow Yandex to index public Facebook data in the countries it serves and use them as search results. In exchange, Yandex will deliver traffic to Facebook.

While Facebook and Google dominate their respective categories in the US, Russia has its own favorite social network (VKontakte) and search engine (Yandex). According to Quartz, VKontakte has over 100 million active users, more than Facebook has in the country, though Russians on Facebook tend to be more affluent and urban. Yandex, like Google, is not only a search engine but an array of services and is similarly integral to the way Russians use the Internet.

Starting Tuesday, Yandex will start using Facebook’s data in two ways. First, it will take “public” posts and comments from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey and display them as search results for relevant queries. Second, on the back end, Yandex will take data from Facebook, like posts that have “resonance,” and use that to augment its search result rankings.